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Tag Archives: pets

Some eight or nine years ago, a long lean overgrown kitten insinuated himself into the lives of my neighborhood. Coal black, big sage green eyes, he had a princely air of privilege and ownership that belied his status as a stray. He plopped himself on my patio and began talking to my girls through the French doors. Christabel and Cindy Crawford were a bit flustered, being older divas and not used to young male admirers. But they seemed to tolerate him and almost look forward to his visits. They would slip around him at the door as he munched a handful of dry food, and soon all would be lounging around the patio, pleasantly absorbing the sun.

A natural charmer, Blackie became a regular visitor to houses for a three or four block radius. He developed a route through the subdivision. One morning, when I was leaving unusually early, my garage door went up and I saw him come to attention four houses away and race toward my house. He got his treat.

Generally good mannered, I had to take him to task a couple of times for walking in and taking a tour of my house. After that, he realized he would only be fed on the patio and was satisfied to wait for me there. Often when I let my cats out, he was already lying on the seat of my patio chair under the oak tree.

He came to know which yards were safe and who offered refuge. Another morning, I pulled out of my garage later than usual and discovered two bruisers of dogs trying to pin him down. He raced to the grill of my front entrance, but the mailman had pushed it inward and so the dogs were able to corner him. I came flying out of my car screaming, which distracted them long enough for Blackie to scoot past and along the back of my front hedge. But they quickly pinned him down at the gate between my house and my neighbor Maria’s. They would have snapped him in two in another minute. Perhaps foolishly, I rushed to his aid and was promptly knocked down in the skirmish. My strident yelling sent one dog running, as Blackie disappeared over my fence. The other Rottweiler-mix trotted a few steps, then turned to assess whether I was worth attacking, but finally raced away.

Shaken and upset, I left the car idling and hurried through the house to the backyard. Blackie cowered in a cleft between my tree and the back fence, covered in slobber but without visible wounds. While I went for a treat and a towel, he disappeared into Maria’s yard.

Returning that evening, I found the small pile of food I’d left untouched. I called to Blackie and heard a faint mew from over the fence. Knowing my neighbor was out of town and fearing the worst, I invaded her yard and discovered him huddled in the rafters of her tool shed, where he’d been all day. Coaxing him down and through the gap in my fence, he returned to the safety of my yard, where he stayed for a few days, until he recovered his bravado enough to resume his neighborhood rounds.

My neighbor Bonnie and I took Blackie to the vet to be fixed, and annually to get his shots. He didn’t hold it against us.

Then four years ago, a new couple moved in a few doors down. Blackie walked in the door to welcome them and decided to stay. Anna and Hector adopted and loved him. He became an indoor cat who occasionally went out to greet his old friends, human and feline. He would still come and wind around my feet if I happened to be working in the yard.

A few months ago, Anna noticed that Blackie returned from his prowl limping. She thought he might have injured himself. On inspection she discovered a lump in the joint of his leg. After a lot of tests and general angst among his friends, Blackie went through surgery to remove his right front leg. He came back looking like a peg-leg pirate.

Miraculously, he seemed to recover his balance and his sense of humor and fun. He still managed to climb and loved sunning himself, but Anna kept him close to home. Then recently they discovered lumps over his kidneys. He became lethargic and Anna discovered blood in his urine, then his gums bled.

He was loved and cared for until it seemed his pain was inexcusable. I visited with him yesterday. petting his almost limp and emaciated body and sharing stories with Anna. A low rumble of a purr and a steady flick of the tail were his only response. His glazed eyes, once green were dark with a slim corona of blue, but seemed to focus briefly and I think he remembered me and enjoyed the slow and steady stroke of my hand. But the time came to leave, and later last night, Anna and Hector welcomed the pet Hospice people who came to end his pain and put him gently and quietly to sleep.

His sweet presence will be missed by many in the neighborhood, but most acutely by Anna and Hector. Goodnight, sweet Prince. And flights of angels sing thee to thy rest.

My cats wake me up at 5:30 every morning. I suppose that’s partly my fault, but I don’t know how.

They became my alarm clock some years ago. Unfortunately, I can’t turn them off on weekends or use their noses as a snooze button.

It starts with Cindy Crawford, my white and black calico with the beauty mark beside her mouth. She meanders over the contours of my body to then circle and coil herself into the nook between my chin and shoulder. Her hot breath alternating with my own, she revs that engine in her throat and chest that passes for a purr. Then she starts to knead my flesh with her front (un-declawed) paws. Sometimes the tiny pricks of pain are bearable and elicit only a slight groan from my befogged brain and throat. Other times, after she has sharpened them on everything from the backyard fence to the nineteenth-century Amish sideboard, they pierce my epidermis like needles into balloons, causing me to surge to one side of the bed, sleepily flinging her across the room.

But when we synchronize our throaty exhalations and become the ying and yang of pur/snoring, it is a peaceful and lovely world.

About this time, Christabel, the elder of my two cats, tobogans onto the bed (often from the peak of a piece of furniture) and nestles on my back slope, causing me to contort into a question mark. When at last the position is unsustainable and I slip the bonds of their embrace onto my side, then Christabel walks the ridgeline of my slightly bent legs and establishes a campsite at the summit of my hip. There she will sit, staring at me with her laser-like obsidian glare until at last it pierces my brain. If, at length, I roll onto my back, it is slowly so that she can navigate the avalanche of my hip and abdomen to surmount and nestle between the mounds of my breasts. From that valley she continues to peer at me.

If I manage to keep my eyes closed through all this, Christabel extends her paw to just above my chin or nose and ever so delicately pokes me with one claw. After a couple of minutes of this affectionate prodding, my eyes at last come open and I glance toward the clock to see that it is exactly 5:30.

I struggle into a sitting position as they slalom down the hall to lead the parade toward the finish line in the kitchen. Once I’ve stumbled into the den and turned on the kitchen light, both cats take their positions on their respective area rugs and patiently wait to be rewarded. Christabel emitting a sharp and somewhat discordant feline version of “Well?” every two seconds until I have at length rinsed their dishes, paper-toweled them dry, spooned out exactly half a can of fancy moist cat food into each, and bestowed it directly in front of one then the other.

As they begin to delicately partake of their gourmet feast, I stumble once again to my disheveled bed and fling myself onto the mattress and beneath the comforter for two hours of the deepest sleep that I’ve probably gotten all night.

I guess, in a way, their breakfast is the snooze button. Because just about 7:20, we start the whole process all over again, except they don’t get fed and I do end up in the shower.

Christabel was the ugly kitten sibling of Maud, a pale grey ball of fluff that was my one true love. They were the last of a litter and I felt I could not take one without the other. I brought both home the December after I bought my first house.

Maud was asthmatic and like a sickly child became my focus and my favorite. While she lived, she was sole beneficiary of my queen-sized bed. Even when Cindy arrived a year later, a much bigger and more adventurous cat, she deferred to Maud. I still hear her perfectly pitched and harmonious purr in my dreams. She disappeared without a trace in 2012. I cried almost as much and as long over her loss as I did when my mother died two years later.

It was only after she had been gone for some time and Christabel and I had mourned deeply and separately that she and Cindy began to take turns trying to comfort me. It has evolved into a loving communal, almost sensual co-dependence of living beings in a shared space.

We have aged together and settled into our little rituals and loving patterns much as any trio of friends might. They are now sixteen and fifteen years old. The question becomes, what shall I do to fill the hollow formed by their little bodies, when they too are gone.